Pages

US Free Trade Agreement - CAFCA Press Release

US FREE TRADE AGREEMENT A POISONED CHALICE FOR NZ

The proposed expansion of the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (NZ, Chile, Brunei, and Singapore, commonly known as the P4 Agreement) to include investment and financial services, and to add the US to its membership, was bad enough.

But for this to suddenly morph into a fullblown Free Trade Agreement with the US is catastrophic for any remaining economic sovereignty that New Zealand has. We say this not because we are “anti-American”. All such FTAs – such as with China, or the existing P4 partners, for instance - pose the same threat to a greater or lesser degree. And our opposition to them is not because of “xenophobia” but for well founded grounds that they simply enmesh NZ more and more tightly in a cobweb of transnational corporate control.

So it’s a recipe for disaster to enter into an FTA with the biggest economy in the world, headed by a Government that aggressively pushes the interests of American Big Business (there is a seamless flow between the US Government and US Big Business, as is evidenced by the current trillion dollar bailout of the mega-greedy financial sector, a textbook example of socialism for the rich).

A full blown US FTA will:

Remove any remaining “restrictions” on foreign investment, as the US regards NZ’s (purely token) oversight regime as “discriminating” against US transnational corporationspush up the price of medicines by potentially hundreds of millions of dollars a year by attacking Pharmac;make access to digital recordings more expensive, and copying more restricted;attack our GE controls and food labelling,weaken our controls on food imports where they might carry diseases.

Both Labour and National myopically see a US FTA as being the Holy Grail of their adherence to the cargo cult of “free trade”. It’s actually a poisoned chalice and it will be New Zealand which will be poisoned by it.

2 comments:

Great post. I especially found it interesting. For this matter, once I discussed with one of my friends, www.geonlineservice.com not only about the content you talked about, but also to how to improve and develop, but no results. So I am deeply moved by what you said today.

I’m gna just share my views from top to bottom as I see them.I feel this is a good simply because its consistent with how the user is used to seeing the comment form and filling out information in general. Filling out the name and email wont take me much time, and if you really wanted to go ahead and type the comment first, you can do so, not really that big of a work around. online marketing